Microsoft showed Internet Explorer 9 for the first time yesterday at its Professional Developer Conference, but a technical preview won't be available before next year (perhaps at CES 2010 in January). Instead, Windows Senior Vice President Steven Sinofsky demonstrated the latest test version, with the Trident rendering engine running on DirectX instead of GDI - to show that IE development is still going on, and making progress on performance and support for standards. read the restWe've been talking to the IE team a few times this week, and keeping an eye on the comments and thinking about the reception IE gets. I'm not sure why I feel the need to apologise for using IE 8 because I like it and it works well for me; perhaps because it marks me as 'not cool' to use and like IE. It's not my favourite browser - that's Skyfire on Windows Mobile, which is gecko underneath, but running on a server in the cloud, which should preserve my geek credentials... So much of the discussion about browsers generates more heat and light. So much of the reaction against IE seems to be Mac/Windows mud-slinging, general 'Microsoft the Evil Empire mud-slinging' or a conflation of every version of Internet Explorer that's ever sucked with the current version. What do we need apart from a civil debate based on the actual merits? A better test and better ways of deciding what should be in the tests.
PDC incorporates the moile developer conference of old, and covers embedded devices; the .NET Micro Framework for mobile devices hits version 4 - and goes open source. That's got to be pushback against Android and Moblin and the otehr mobile Linux distros.
Office 2010 beta is on MSDN and TechNet already. Expect to hear a lot more about Office soon...
interesting note: Justin sees social media and online resources as so important going forward that they've put in a T1 to the winery.
tonight in Santa Barbara working, LA tomorrow for PDC. it was very nice to have the break.
Thursday we picked up the car and moseyed south to San Jose to stay over with Rowan and Russell: good conversation and good pizza and wonderful grinds itself coffee in the morning. Spike appeared and we all went to Original Joes for huge things with masses of spinach and bacon. If the bread wasn't so good I might have managed the whole eggplant parmigiana :)
We emptied our postbox - many back issues of Inc and Fast Company and lovely books from Tim Pratt - and dropped off whisky mead with saffronrose of this parish and drove over to meet our friends Jon and Tamzen and convoy down to Paso Robles.
it's a couple of hours drive, much of it through pretty hills with the sky turning pretty colours. The Hampton Suites seems to have us flagged as 'we like you' as they gave us an even bigger suite, so we hung out on the sofa and geeked gently and poked fun at some of the winery descriptions in the guide until dinner at Artisan.
I didn't note down all the wines in the elite local flight, but they were all excellent, including the chateau margene. simon's meatball gnocchi was rather more substantial than my chicken wing confit which was an elegant boned version of buffalo wings. simon had the veal wellington with a yummy cauliflower thing and I had duck with dirty pecan rice with ham hock. Simon had pumpkin pie cheesecake and I attempted to customise my apple fritter sundae with pear sorbet but they'd run out!
saturday we started at windward: I'm not sure about the 'signature peacock tail finish' but definitely cherry in the pinot noir and there was a cute cat that had adopted the winery and apparated into the summerhouse. JanKris aslo had a cute kitty that had adopted them: excellent unpretentious blends and varietals and they've added a sparkling raspberry to the peach and almond we already liked. We stopped at Eagle to admire the castle and the moat and had lunch at the new deli at Four Vines, roadstand 46 (I've been saying hatstand all weekend) where the fried chicken is awesome. The new tasting room at Four Vines is very echoey but it's nice to have more space and the Heretic and Maverick and Naked Chardonnay are as good as ever: the new 9-blend Cypher is rich and portugese in flavour. we turned down to Jack Creek: out of the way, pricey but excellent wines. Denner was closed for their pickup party so we stopped at Jada, which has sold out of almost everything and finished up at Norman where we succumbed to a case of 2003 Monster zinfandel. we stocked up on tangerine olive oil at Pasoliveo, so there are more chocolate orange brownies in our future.
a quick float in the hot tub and dinner at Justin: pumpkin walnut soup or trout, pork belly on french toast with pear sauce (which we had in the amuse bouche of biscuit and prosciutto), venison wellington or pheasant with cream sauce and cornbread stuffing and chocolate bread pudding or a deconstructed pumpkin pie. yum.
i do wish I hadn't finished with the coffee as it upset my stomach so we had a late and gentle start, driving in to town for coffee at the Amsterdam Coffee Shop where they play the satellite radio Coffeeshop station. we peered in at the studio space and admired the trees in the square and wandered through the olde fashionedde sweete shoppee complete with Dick and Jane books, then drove back to Justin for the winery tour.
hmmph: this client has a word limit.
All in all, State Farm goes down from 10/10 to 7/10 in my rating. Maybe lower once I work out what this 'minimum balance' thing is...
also - bacon sandwiches and massage for the win!
I though the article was a bad one and I asked if the PCC covered offensive articles; the answer was pretty much, no.
"Thank you for your complaint about the Rod Liddle article. We have received several complaints about this matter. I do understand your concerns. However, I must make two points about the role and function of the PCC:
1. The PCC can only consider complaints framed within the attached Code of Practice: http://www.pcc.org.uk. This does not cover issues of offensiveness. The PCC will not be able to intervene in a columnist's right to free expression on the grounds that his comments are offensive. This does not make your concerns invalid; rather it means that the PCC is likely not to be the appropriate forum to consider them.
2. It is not for the PCC to determine whether or not a criminal act has been undertaken or incited. Issues of alleged illegality must be for the police and the courts.
If you feel that your complaint falls within the remit of the PCC, and the Code of Practice, do let me know. Otherwise, we will not be able to take this further."
The PCC says basically you can't harass people, or do insider trading, or pursue children, and you should try to be accurate and give a right of reply. Tasteless photos (unless they're intrusive) and tasteless comments aren't covered. And I suppose that's about right. If we framed a clause that said 'you can't say it's a good idea to poison someone's cat because it pees on your vegetable bed', it would be hard to word it in such a way that it didn't stop people writing about the BNP or issues of racism generally - and as I believe that information rather than censorship is the way to deal with propaganda I'm in favour of it. I could write to the Sunday Times and complain to them, but I'm loathe to let them know I bothered to click a link to read the column in the first place. So I'll use my freedom of speech to say that while the columnist does a fine job of amusing people who like spite and bile, this was offensive and I'll actively try to avoid his writing in future. Free speech is a fine line to walk and being gratuitously offensive does no-one any favours.
- Mood:
grumpy
According to the Telegraph, the town appears on Google Maps in the middle of fields close to the M58 motorway, just south of Ormskirk. Actually, it appears about where the bottom of our garden was; we lived on Bold Lane and we had a long garden, a huge wood pile, a greenhouse with a shed built onto the side and behind that - you actually had to squeeze between the shed and the hedge, was a small summerhouse bower that I discovered when I was 11. Those green fields were the cow fields with the shortcut from the church to the station and the shop (Aughton was a hamlet, because although it had a church and a school it had no shop - and the school is now an old peoples home). Aughton Park is the new estate that dwarfs the original place... So, my childhood was spent in an imaginary place? Pretty much - though I got there through books.
Last week I linked to a US judge's ruling that the fourth amendment doesn't protect your privacy on a cloud service; now here's a reminder that RIPAA in the UK is just as unhelpful. Maybe this will give some impetus to the change in the law @Robert Neuschul was hoping to see (although with file sharing changes (I refuse to call it legislation when it's a diktat MPs don't get to vote on) set to scour our ever packet, I don't feel hopeful.
BBC: EU criticises UK government for not stopping BT using Phorm
Brussels said this showed that UK laws, particularly The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, did not do enough to protect data about the e-mails and web browsing habits of citizens.
Money quote; "Most of the reluctance to apply traditional notions of third party disclosure to the e-mail context seems to stem from a fundamental misunderstanding of the lack of privacy we all have in our e-mails. Some people seem to think that they are as private as letters, phone calls, or journal entries. The blunt fact is, they are not."
So - could we all start encrypting our emails please? It's legal, it's not expensive, it's probably not even that difficult any more - but for some reason we just all can't be bothered. I guess if we're going to flaunt it all on Facebook, email privacy is so 1990s...
He’s the man who brought open source to Silicon Graphics and NEC and advisor to Warburg Pincus on how to make money investing in open source. "At one point I got the title of open source's undercover agent," recalls Dave McAllister. He was recruited by Adobe as Director of open source and standards with a specific mission: "I was hired to, a) start an open source process and, b) get PDF approved as an ISO standard." So: mission accomplished?
- Location:Las Vegas
I often feel like the trustee in Aliens 3: "this is rumour control". But there is a little more than rumours, and that's the re-org and governance of the Windows team that I'm pondering a lot.
I was so keen to get Windows Mobile 6.5 on the Touch Pro I was using earlier this year that I tried a developer ROM on it and definitely preferred it to 6.1; but I've been so happy with the Touch Pro 2 that I almost didn't want to update it. In the interests of science, I upgraded both that and the Toshiba TG01 last week - you can read what I think of the new version on Tom's Guide Windows Mobile 6.5: worth upgrading?
And then I went shopping at Marketplace: the new WinMo app store: again for Tom's Guide I looked at how it works, what you get and whether Microsoft should do its own app store at all.
Closing the gap between what readers and viewers want and what you commission as an editor and pitch as a writer could deliver fantastic content; or it could deliver low-quality fodder to slap ads on. Am I optimistic enough that quality will win out or am I going to be out of a job?
WIRED: The answer factory
Such a good score that we are now driving through torrential sunny rain (we saw the straight lines of it from miles away like pencil scratchings) that is producing both a big rainbow in the sky and another that appears to end under the wheels of the car as we drive :)
From next week, if you're buying a PC it will come with Windows 7. Do you care which version you get? Yes - but not nearly as much as you did with earlier versions of Windows. Exactly what features do you get in which version and how does it matter: here's what I think
There may be six versions of Windows 7, but unless you need the business features of Professional or Ultimate, Windows 7 Home Premium is the version you want.
But what do you get in Home Premium and is it the right mix of features?
LA was sunny if a little cooler than usual; after a flight that demonstrated quite how much of the west coast is desert and mountains, we're in a bright but very crisp Seattle... and booking travel from Vegas on to Boston and New York.
While Painter continues to add features, I hear from some users that it can be somewhat buggy; from what we've seen at Adobe MAX this week, the next version of Photoshop might be an alternative. While Adobe is careful to say that all the demos in the Star Wars-themed (Mark Hamill had hosted the awards and stuck around for the preview to be gracious and funny about having no idea what the presenters - many of them in Star Wars costume - were talking about) Sneak Peek preview might never make it into a shipping product, the 3D-modelled, chemically-accurate natural media paintbrush looked in pretty good shape. The PatchMatch demo didn't go quite so well; doing a random walk across the image to find textures that match the hole you're trying to fill is an interesting technique but it didn't always find the perfect texture. Microsoft Research in Cambridge is looking at an alternative to seam-caving based on random Markov chaining that should also look across the image much faster - and the now-defunct Picture It! had what I call the 'remove tourist button' back in 2004 which did a very similar thing for removing unwanted objects. It's great to see the state-of-the art in photo touch-up moving on so much; with the MSRC-based background removal tool in the Office 2010 apps, we're starting to see a real democratisation of what used to be pro tools that took a long time to learn.
In detail: Future features for Photoshop revealed
We've had a couple of really packed days at MAX; Adone runs the gamut from gaming to enterprise apps to design to developer tools and we've had keynotes, presentations and interviews on a ton of interesting news, including Full Flash on your phone by next year... and a sneak preview of the Avatar movie. We've occupied the time waiting for the keynotes to start by looking for the in-jokes in the stage backdrop (above)...
- Location:LA
That I completely forgot to mention in my post about arriving in LA, is that Westin is four circular towers attached to a central atrium; this means that rooms in the towers are like Trivial Pursuit segments; our room has a seven-sided irregular polygon recess in the ceiling of a room shaped like a slice of pie. The hotel also has its own brewery with an outdoor terrace, where we huddled around the patio headers saying 'oooh, bit of a nip in the weather' and drinking the Blonde witbeer (Simon could say he had a blonde in each hand); similarly, when we arrived at Venice Beach to discover something of a howling gale, I commented that "Skegness is so bracing".
Point of information; either our English friend who moved to San Francisco last year now has the drinking capacity of an American or the Tanqueray martinis here are unusually lethal. Having seen them poured, I believe it's the latter.
- Location:LA
The revolving cocktail lounge at the Westin Bonaventure is called the Bona Vista: varder the eek on her, with souvenir cocktail glasses the shape of boots. The whole hotel is odd, with ponds and fountains and lamellar jets and ceramic statues with applique ceramic breasts and colour-coded external lifts as dangled from by The Governator in True Lies (there's a plaque on the lift) and oval 'pods' at the edge of the atrium levels, which have fitness equipment in... We walked down to the convention centre to register for MAX, at just the right time while it was warm and sunny and just before it became baking hot. It was the tail end of the LA Triathlon so lots of the streets were closed, meaning we didn't have to wait for the streetlights, but did have to detour around the finish line - so now we know a shortcut into the back of the conference centre. And now we're off on a tourist bus trip!
LA, Seattle, Las Vegas, New York; back in the UK at the end of October.
Pipes, clouds and scarcity
Wireless docking finally arrives
The new Dell Latitude Z isn't the only new laptop with the option of a wireless dock. Nearly three years after it first showed off the idea (at the Portégé R400 launch at CES 2007), now that the UWB and Wireless USB standards are finally through all the regulatory hurdles, Toshiba is bringing out its DynaDock W10 wireless docking station.
Read the rest at ZDNet
Longhorn isn't real either; so much of the original vision got lsot by the wayside. In my other big piece on TechRadar this week, I look at why the death of DreamScenes is the last gasp of the Longhorn vision...
"
On 16 February 2009, the Counter-Terrorism Act 2008 (Commencement No.2) Order 2009 brought in to force section 58A of the Terrorism Act 2000 (inserted by section 76 of the CTA 2008), offences relating to information about members of the armed forces etc.
Section 58A makes it an offence to publish, communicate, elicit or attempt to elicit information about any of such persons which is of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism. Contrary to some media and public misconception, section 58A does not make it illegal to photograph a police officer, military personnel or member of the intelligence services.
On the 18 August 2009, the Home Office published the following information via its website to clarify photography in relation to section 58A.
Photography and Section 58A of the Terrorism Act 2000
The offence concerns information about persons who are or have been at the front line of counter-terrorism operations, namely the police, the armed forces and members of the security and intelligence agencies.
An officer making an arrest under section 58A must reasonably suspect that the information is of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism. An example might be gathering information about the person’s house, car, routes to work and other movements.
Reasonable excuse under section 58A
It is a statutory defence for a person to prove that they had a reasonable excuse for eliciting, publishing or communicating the relevant information. Legitimate journalistic activity (such as covering a demonstration for a newspaper) is likely to constitute such an excuse. Similarly, an innocent tourist or other sight-seer taking a photograph of a police officer is likely to have a reasonable excuse."
I'm not sure I feel that's quite the 'innocent until proven guilty' tradition of UK law...
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- Simon & Mary
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